We Who Are Alive and Remain
by kilara25
Summary: Terrified by changes she witnesses in herself, Sookie hides from the world and everyone in it. When Eric wrests her secret from her, she will either find that he is worthy of her trust-or she'll be dead. EricSookie, angst, suspense, romance
1. Chapter 1

_today_

Sunset. Through the window of her grandmother's kitchen, Sookie watches the sky turn orange and pink. There's a haze in the air; even in the evenings, the humidity is so high that sitting on her front porch is like soaking to the neck in a tub of warm bathwater.

The kitchen's not her favorite spot in the house anymore. It's not completely to do with Gran being murdered there-just, it shouldn't be empty. It was built for a family, three generations of Stackhouses all crowded together, swatting each other's hands to get at the last biscuit in the bowl. She finds herself wondering how it happens, how a family diminishes over time. She wonders if Gran ever thought about her own grandmother, matriarch of a clan that boasted fifteen at the time of her death. Had she thought her old age would be different than it was? Had she lived all those years, only to come to the end of her life, a disappointed woman?

The wedding clock in the living room strikes seven. Eric will be here soon. She hasn't seen anyone all day. She hasn't seen anyone in several days. Sookie shuts her eyes and prays to God for strength, though maybe she ought to pray for mercy instead. She gropes around in the darkness behind her eyes like she's in an attic with the bulb burned out. She's trying to find some trace of what she's lost, the splinters of a wall that's been knocked down. But she comes up empty, like always, and when her eyes open again there are tears running down her face.

She's scared to death. But she's had a couple of years of regular doses of terror to teach her mind how to cope with it. Sookie's way is to go over all the things that can't go wrong, no matter how bad things get. Like, if she dies, she won't leave behind grieving children to be raised by strangers. Better than nothing, right?

A swell of laughter bursts from her throat, followed by a choked sob. _What kind of life am I fighting for here?_ she asks herself. And the answer comes, trotting on the heels of the thought like an obedient dog answering its master's call: _The only one you've got._

As the last of the light fades in the western sky, she looks across the empty table and pictures Eric in the seat opposite her. He'd been here a week ago, before the worst happened, before the levees broke inside her. He'd been-kind.

She'll have to remember that tonight, that there's kindness in him. It might help, even if it won't save her life.

* * *

_a week ago_

"May I enter?" he'd said when he arrived on her doorstep, as though it were the first time.

On auto-pilot, and too weary to care why he'd come, Sookie stepped back to let him pass. "Please do."

She felt his eyes on her face as he walked in. She knew what he was seeing-a week of sleeplessness, regular shifts at work that all felt like doubles. She was tired, and her brain was leaking. It showed in her face.

"I see now why the shifter called me," said Eric, after she led him into the kitchen to sit down.

"Sam called you?" she said. She knew her voice sounded hoarse and flat, like she was less interested in the answer than she really was. "What for?"

A frown deepened on Eric's face. He hadn't blinked since he first clapped eyes on her. He hadn't even looked once at her breasts. "He was concerned," he said. "He's afraid that you are ill, or that something is troubling you. He said there have been-incidents at the bar."

Sookie ignored the question buried in the statement. "So he called you," she said. "'Cause it went so well last time you two got together to cheer me up."

Eric's nostrils flared, and his mouth tightened. "We were well intentioned," he said. "I cannot help finding him annoying."

"There's not a day of my life goes by I don't want to knock someone over the head with a full mug of beer, but at least I know how to show restraint."

"You don't need to tell me that." Eric smiled for the first time since walking into the house. "Your self-denial borders on masochism, or you would not have resisted me for this long."

"I've done harder things," said Sookie, not even a little bit tempted to rise to the bait. "Believe me."

A mixed series of emotions flit lightly over Eric's features, but none come to settle. "I know this is true." His voice took on an ironic tinge. "I am not sure I can say the same."

"Then I guess you just need to pull up your big-vamp panties and learn to deal with it."

Eric's mouth twisted, whether with humor or irritation she couldn't tell. "I am here for no other purpose."

"Excuse me?"

"I wish to settle the questions that remain to be answered between us."

Sookie shut her eyes. She wasn't prepared for this conversation. She wasn't prepared for any conversation, tonight. "What questions are those?"

"You love me," said Eric.

Her chest constricted, like she'd been laced into a corset. She shut her eyes; when that wasn't enough, she turned her whole head.

"That's not a question," she said when could speak again.

"You did love me," said Eric, in a tone of amendement. His voice is strangely free of challenge, of bravado. "Do you love me still?"

"I don't have an answer for that." Her reply came automatically, a defense mechanism as instinctive as throwing up her hands to shield her face from a blow.

Eric leaned over the table. "You do not know, or you will not say?"

"Both," said Sookie. "I'm not going to tell you what I'm thinking just so you can use my uncertainty to try and talk me into seeing things your way."

"Do you not trust me, Sookie?" She had heard Eric assume a tone of injury before, when he was trying to guilt her into something, but the stiffness in his voice now was much more likely to be the real thing. "You once said that you did."

She couldn't answer for a long moment. This was, after all, the heart of the matter. "Not enough to expose everything that's most vulnerable in me," she said at last. "I did that once, and I paid for it."

"You are speaking of Bill."

"Not just him." Bill, Quinn, Calvin, Alcide, Jason, Renee, Arlene, every person she'd ever trusted only to be disappointed in later. Everyone she knew was on that list, just about. Except for Eric. She wanted to keep it that way.

"Have I not proven that I would risk my life for yours?" Eric looked proud, and angry. "Believe me, Sookie, as rare as such a thing is in a human, it is even rarer in vampires."

"You've done a lot for me, I don't deny that."

Eric's tone became eager, pleading. Before she could snatch her hand away, he reached across the table and caught it in his larger one. "I wish to do more."

"You're generous." Sookie knew she didn't sound enthusiastic. She hoped she didn't sound insulting.

"I offered to bring you to my side, once." Eric grasped her hand more tightly. "I would offer that again."

Sookie shut her eyes again. Gently, she pulled her hand away, and Eric let her go. With a human man, some of them at least, she might manage to throw off their grip even if they didn't want to release her. With Eric, her freedom was always his choice.

"Do you know any stories from the Bible?" she heard herself say.

Eric sat back in his chair, brow hunkered low over his eyes. "I am over a thousand years old, Sookie, it is safe to say that I am familiar with the tenets of Christianity."

"I was just thinking about Esther."

"Esther." Eric turns the name over in his mouth. "She was a queen of Babylon?"

Sookie nodded. "The king married her because she won a sort of beauty contest." In her head, she can see the opulent illustrations from the children's Bible she'd had as a gift from Gran on her fifth birthday. "She didn't tell anyone she was a Jew, but when the king's advisor persuaded him to kill all the Jews in his kingdom, she went to the king and asked him to save her people."

"Did he?" Eric's face betrayed something like professional curiosity.

"Yes," said Sookie. "When she told him she had a request to make, he told her he'd give her anything-'up to half my kingdom', it says in the scripture."

Eric nodded, as though he approved. "He valued her."

"I guess so." Sookie began twisting the edge of the cloth placemat between her fingers. "But the point of the story is that she risked her life just by asking him. He might have said no, and then everyone would know she was Jewish, and she'd die with the rest of her people. Or he might have had her killed just for coming into his presence uninvited."

She heard her voice rising and falling as she edged closer and closer to tears. She risked a glance up at Eric and found him frowning, a look of baffled displeasure on his face.

"Sookie," he said, not ungently. "Is there a point to this?"

She had to force herself to breathe in order to speak. "You don't know everything about me," she said.

"I never supposed that I did," said Eric immediately.

"If I let you in-the way I'd want to, if we were really together-I'd be taking my life in my hands."

Eric reached over the table and laid both hands over hers, forcing them to still their fretful picking at the placemat.

"On my life," he said, "I would never harm you."

"People change. Even vampires." She was surprised that she wasn't crying. She was probably too dehydrated by now.

Eric didn't let her go. His thumb traced circles on the back of her wrist. It reminded her of the way her father had rubbed her back over her shirt to help her fall asleep at night.

"Do you think," he said, in a careful voice, "that if you married a mortal man, you would be safe?"

"Not necessarily," she said. "But we would be equal in a way you and I could never be. All these things you want to give me-they can't make me your equal. You could take them away again in a heartbeat."

Eric squeezed her wrist, and sat back in his chair again. "You are wise, Sookie," he said, surprising her. "You do understand the nature of gifts, especially the gifts of the powerful. But do you not see that no two people, human or vampire, can be perfectly equal? And do you not see that I would be vulnerable to you as well? Your gift, your fae blood, even your simple humanity-you know where I sleep, you can walk in the day, you might have killed me any number of times when I was powerless to stop you."

It had crossed her mind before. "I doubt I would have lived for long afterwards."

"But I would be no less dead. I trust you, Sookie, as I have trusted no one else for as long as I can remember."

Sookie lifted a hand to cover her mouth. It would have betrayed her, otherwise.

"But you cannot say the same," he said a moment later, in a voice of resignation.

Sookie shook her head. "I'm sorry," she managed to say.

Her eyes were on the table when she heard the scrape of chair legs. A second later he was bending over her, planting a kiss on the top of her head.

"Do not cry," he said. "You have not dismayed me. You have set me a challenge. I will prove myself, in time."

And then she heard the thought that followed, clear as a bell. _I should have killed you the day I met you._

Sookie sat frozen at the table until she heard the front door swing shut behind her. Then she walked into the living room, covered her face with a cushion from the couch, and screamed.


	2. Chapter 2

_two weeks ago_

The change had come over her gradually to begin with, pebbles rolling down the side of a mountain just before the avalanche sweeps everything away. It began as a headache, and a low, continuous buzzing in her head, like static from a TV without reception. She noticed it most when she was at work, but neither the noise nor the pain ever went away entirely-not even when she slept, judging by how she felt when she woke up.

For months, since Bill first taught her how to shield herself from other people's thoughts, only the strongest broadcasters had been able to breach her defenses. But the buzzing wrecked her concentration. It grew louder over time, and behind it she heard voices, like a radio playing loudly but unintelligibly in a distant room.

She started making excuses to leave work early on busy nights. She abandoned her tables in the middle of her shifts to hide in the bathroom, just to put a door between herself and the cacophony in the bar.

Her last night at work, Sam cornered her in the kitchen. His eyes raked her face, gathering in the shadows under her eyes. He took her face between his hands. He asked if she was alright. She saw his lips move, but didn't hear the question. She tore herself from his grip. Her face stung, as though his touch had burned her.

The buzzing grew louder, a wave rising to its crest. When it broke, Sookie broke with it.

She fell to her knees. Her eyes were screwed shut, her hands clamped uselessly over her ears. She heard Sam shouting her name, as though from a great distance. She felt his hands on her arms; she screamed, and he released her. She slumped back against the leg of table behind her, her fingers tightening in her hair. She heard Sam's frantic voice, calling for her help. She opened her mouth to say _no, no more people_, but nothing escaped except for a moan.

She could tell when Sam left. The clamor in her head dimmed a little. She forced herself to open her eyes. She knew he would be back soon.

Sookie forced herself up to her feet, feeling as though she were lifting more than the weight of her own body. Bracing herself against the table, then the wall, she dragged herself out of the room, through the door in the kitchen that led to the employee parking lot. She made her way to her car, fumbled for the keys in her pocket, and got behind the wheel. It crossed her mind that she might very well wrap her car around a tree before she got very far in her escape. Then it crossed her mind that death would be a relief.

She drove for over a mile before the noise in her head began to ebb.

* * *

She didn't get out of bed until after sunset the next day.

She'd powered her cell phone off and pulled the cord on the phones closest to her bedroom. When she checked, she found she had five messages: three from Sam, one from Arlene, one from Bill. They all said more or less the same thing.

She felt hung over. She drank juice and showered until the water ran cold. When she got out, she put on a tank top over her pyjama bottoms and went downstairs.

As soon as she stepped into the kitchen, there was a knock at her door. The buzzing in her head started up again. She stood by the table, gripping the back of a chair. The knock came again, louder this time.

"Sookie," came Bill's voice through an open window. "If you don't open this door, I will be forced to break it down."

She'd thought it was Sam. Relief washed over her. Bill would help her. Bill was exactly who she needed.

She unlocked the door, and Bill walked in. His hands found her shoulders, and he looked her up and down, as though checking for signs of injury.

"Are you all right?" he said. "Sam said-"

_you collapsed, you screamed, you were mad with pain, you hid yourself away, why do you always shut me out, I love you, I love you-_

Sookie froze. The warmth of her relief abandoned her. She was locked in place, sealed in a glacier of cold dread.

"I'm fine," she said, when she could speak again.

"You don't look fine," he said. "You look-ill." _She never goes to the doctor because it's too expensive, her aunt died of cancer, she's so fragile, I could turn her, she'd forgive me afterwards-_

Sookie took a step back, and Bill's hands fell away.

"Probably just a little old stomach bug," she said. "I slept all day, I'll be fine."

"Sam said he hadn't seen you like that since before you learned to shield," said Bill. A frown came to settle over his eyes. "I thought I taught you enough to keep yourself from being overwhelmed like that."

"You did," Sookie assures him, forcing a cheerful note into her voice. "But sometimes it gets harder when I'm tired, or not feeling well. I'll be right as rain in no time."

Bill looked down on her, a shadow passing over his face. "You should speak to Eric," he said. "He may be able to teach you better than I." _I wish I'd never taken her to Fangtasia, I wish I'd killed Eric before he ever set eyes on her._

"That's a good idea," said Sookie. Her cheeks hurt from smiling. "I'll call him tonight." She tried to infuse a dismissal into her words, and Bill seemed to sense it, because he took a step back.

"Is there anything you need?" he said. "Anything at all I can do for you?"

"Nope." Sookie thought quickly. "Just-don't talk to anyone about what happened, if you don't mind. People think I'm crazy enough as it is."

"Of course."

"Don't go talking to Eric behind my back either." She tried to sound playful. "He'll get sore at me if I don't tell him first."

"I won't say anything," Bill assured her. _She's hiding something from me, from Eric, she's smiling like she does when she hears people thinking unpleasant things about her, she can't play games like this with Eric, he's less human than I am, she doesn't understand that, oh God, I'll be the death of her._

Sookie stood holding the storm door open until Bill kissed her on the forehead and stepped outside. She let the door swing shut. Her face burned in the place where his cool lips had grazed her.


	3. Chapter 3

**Author's Note**: I've had some PM's asking me to clarify the point in canon where this story takes place. I understand your confusion. The fact is, I'm not really sure. I had this idea, and I wanted to write it, and in order for it to work, certain things had to have happened, and other things can't have happened yet. All I can say is that it's set some time after Eric regains his memories, but before she meets Niall, and therefore before Felipe de Castro takes over Louisiana. If it makes you more comfortable, feel free to think of it as an AU.

Also, I'm afraid it's going to be quite short. Two or three more chapters before it's wrapped up.

* * *

_four days ago_

Sookie called Sam and told him she needed a vacation. She told him she didn't know how long she'd need-a couple of weeks, maybe. She said she'd call him when she was ready to come back, and hung up on him before he could argue. She weighed the chances of being fired against the probability that she wouldn't be alive long enough to feel the effects of unemployment. She decided she might as well take some time for herself to reflect on her life and get right with the Lord before the end came.

Then again, she wasn't so sure she was on speaking terms with God at the moment. He was the one who'd had the bright idea to open her defenseless human brain up to the thoughts of vampires, after all.

She didn't call Eric when she told Bill she would. Sam called him instead, and Eric came to see her. At first, she'd heard nothing from Eric except what he said aloud. She'd begun to hope that reading Bill's thoughts was a glitch, something left over from the blood they'd shared. But that made no sense, of course. She'd shared a lot more blood with Eric.

And then Eric had leaned over to kiss her goodbye, and she'd heard him wishing he'd killed her ages ago-presumably before he developed _feelings_ for her-and the last of her hopes for living to old age came crashing down around her.

She spent the next five days sealed in her house, contemplating her probable lack of future.

Eric wanted her to say she was in love with him. That didn't mean he was in love with her. She knew he wanted her, but no matter how she looked at it, she couldn't persuade herself that desire alone would be enough to save her when he eventually figured out the truth.

To give him credit, Sookie didn't think Eric would enjoy killing her. But he'd do it. He'd told her once he'd be her friend as long as doing so didn't risk his life or the well-being of his area. Clearly, he'd stretched his original position to include taking on a certain degree of personal risk for her sake. But she knew him well enough to know that he would jeopardize himself before he would endanger the people he was responsible for.

A Sookie who was dangerous to Eric, he might endure. A Sookie who threatened every vampire she met-that was another matter.

And what if he did love her? What if, faced with the choice, he decided that she was more important to him than the security of Area 5? Not even Eric could protect her if the entire undead population of Louisiana turned against her.

There was no point even pretending she could keep it hidden, either. Humans might be willing to believe she was just crazy, but her telepathy was no secret among vampires. And she couldn't shield anymore, not even a little bit. It was just a matter of time before they figured it out.

On top of all this, even if every vampire in America met the sun tomorrow, she was pretty much ruined for the company of other human beings now. Just the thought of going back to Merlotte's made her want to curl up under the table and die. She'd have to go through the rest of her life making sure she never saw more than one or two people at a time. Forget working again. She'd lose Gran's house and end up in a state mental institution.

Really, she was so completely and utterly _screwed_ that it was almost funny.

She ate an entire half gallon of strawberry ice cream that night.

Five days later, she called Eric at Fangtasia.

"What can I do for you, my lover?" he said, when Pam handed him the phone.

It had been a long time since Sookie heard Eric speak to her without feeling a thrill of delight. Even now, she wasn't immune to him, but the fear and dread that hung over her like a veil kept her from responding in kind.

"I just wanted to give you a head's up," she told him. "I'm taking a vacation for a couple of weeks, so I won't be around. I didn't want you to get worried in case you called and I didn't answer."

This was not, in fact, a complete lie. She was planning to go away. Just not on vacation. More like, on the lam. She planned to stop by the bank first thing tomorrow, withdraw everything that was left of the fifty-thousand Eric had paid her, and skedaddle. Where to, she didn't know yet.

She didn't know why she was bothering to call Eric first.

The pause on the other end of the line was heavy, laden with suspicion. "A vacation?"said Eric. "Where are you going?"

"Haven't made up my mind yet," she said, oddly relieved to be telling the truth. "Some place fun. Maybe with a beach."

"You will inform me of your exact destination before you leave."

"Now listen here," she said, with unfeigned irritation. "The whole point of a vacation is that I don't have to put up with the shit I put up with at home, and that includes vampire busybodies poking their noses into everything I do."

"You are not a child," growled Eric. "Do not act like one. You will be vulnerable anywhere you go. Someone must accompany you."

"I don't think so," said Sookie. "Anyway, I reckon the further I get from you and all your vampire crap, the safer I'll be." _Truer words, Sookie Stackhouse._

When she felt the familiar tingle at the base of her skull, she slid down the wall to the floor, stunned. _He's thirty miles away_, wailed a despairing voice in her head.

A cold silence poured in over the phone.

_I should take her_, Eric was thinking. The distance between them was nothing; he might have been in the kitchen with her, whispering in her ear._ I should put her in a room where no one will find her, and she cannot escape. She isn't worth the agony she brings me. Nothing is worth so much pain._

"Lover," said Eric, and Sookie trembled. "You are lying to me."

"I beg your pardon?" said Sookie, proud, even in her extremity, that her voice was steady.

"You are not going anywhere," said Eric. "You are afraid. You wish me to think you will be gone so that you will not have to see me, and explain yourself."

Sookie covered her face with her hand.

"You will explain now," said Eric. "Or I will come to you, and you will explain in person."

Sookie took in a long, shuddering breath. "Fine," she said. Pain, stronger even than the fear, pierced her body. It seemed to shoot upwards from the scar the stake had left in her side. "Fine. You want an explanation? I don't want to see you anymore."

The silence this time was emptier, somehow. She felt the buzzing of the connection between their minds, but she heard no thoughts. It was as though Eric's mind had been wiped blank by her words.

"You don't wish to see me anymore," he said finally.

"I'm sorry, Eric," she said. She felt tears prick the corners of her eyes, but her voice didn't waver. "I care about you, I really do. But I just can't take it anymore. My life hasn't been my own since the day I met you. I want you to leave me alone from now on."

When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse. She hadn't thought vampires could get hoarse. "Who is making you say these things?"

"No one," she said.

"You are afraid. Someone is threatening you."

"If I'm afraid of anyone, it's you," she said, an almost hysterical note entering her last words.

When the phone went dead a moment later, she clutched it to her chest. She made no effort to quiet her sobs. There was no one to hear anymore.

She was still sitting on the floor in the kitchen ten minutes later, when the door behind her burst open. She screamed, flinging her arms over her head.

Eric fell to his knees before her and seized her wrists, pulling them apart so he could see her face. She couldn't help but look up at him, though her eyes were blurred by tears. His fangs were out; he looked wild, dangerous.

"There's no one here," she said, gasping for air. He would know that already; he would have smelled the presence of another person in the house.

Eric's grip on her arms tightened. His fangs retracted. He stared hard into her face.

Then he was on her, faster than she could see. His lips covered hers, his fingers worked their way into her hair, and for a few seconds she was lost in the smell and the feel and the taste of him.

He tore himself away a moment later. His lips were parted, his eyes wide. He looked lost-more human than she had ever seen him. She forced herself to breathe past the knot in her throat. Her hand came to rest on the side of his face, and he shut his eyes, leaning into her touch.

"Eric," she said. She traced the contour of his cheekbone with her thumb. "Your invitation is rescinded."

His eyes opened. He did not have the chance to speak before he was propelled to his feet and walking backwards through her front door. He reached for her, and for a moment she thought he would seize her and drag her out with him. But his hands closed on emptiness, and she could not tell if she had escaped his grasp or if he had simply let her go.

He came to a stop on her front porch. She followed him to the open door and stood safely out of the reach of his long arms. Eric was angry, furious even, but underneath that he looked lost, as lost as the night she found him on the road and brought him home and bathed the wounds on his feet. She forced herself to look past him, into the yard; Bill stood in front of the house, ready to be Eric's back-up in case she really had been under attack.

"Bill, you are no longer welcome in my house," she said.

She didn't have any energy to spare to feel bad about the shocked and wounded expression that came over Bill's face. She looked back at Eric. He no longer looked angry; he stared at her like she was a puzzle he was trying to work out, and there was a grim urgency in his eyes.

"It isn't _me _you're afraid of," he said, in a voice of revelation.

She didn't correct him. Every second it took him to figure out the truth was a second longer she had to live.

Sookie looked up at Eric. With both hands, she offered him the last living spark of hope she possessed.

"You said I could trust you," she told him. "Well, now's the time to prove it."

Eric took a step back, as though she'd slapped him. Sookie shut the door in his face.


	4. Chapter 4

_today (again)_

There are people in the woods, watching her.

Eric's given them orders to remain out of sight. Sookie can hear them anyway. She follows their thoughts like she'd followed Gran's soap operas, indifferently, because they were on. The moment she stirs out of doors, Eric's people are under orders to take her to Shreveport. The humans who watch her by day are especially nervous about this, because they're also under strict orders not to hurt her, and they know about the shotgun.

Sookie doesn't know if Eric thinks this is some kind of sulk he can outlast, but Gran was a champion canner and she's got enough food in the pantry to outlast a nuclear winter. She's not going anywhere.

On the third night after she rescinded Eric's invitation to the house, he appears outside her bedroom window, hovering in midair.

She hears the tap-tap of his fingers against the glass, and whirls, heart in her throat. He gives her a faint smile, then gestures for her to raise the window. Sookie keeps to the far side of the room and shakes her head. Eric shrugs, and breaks the glass with his fist. Sookie shrieks, and falls backwards into a chair.

"My apologies," says Eric. "I would offer to replace it, but I know how you feel about my gifts."

_I could drive her out of the house, set fire to it, she's so stubborn she wouldn't come out until too late, I could hire professionals to abduct her, she must sleep in my hiding place, none of my people have even glimpsed her at the windows, I can feel her fear, if just once I could touch her again I would make her forget all of this-_

"I don't have anything to say to you," says Sookie. She turns for the door, for a room without windows.

"Playing the coward, Sookie?" says Eric. "How unlike you."

Sookie freezes, then turns deliberately to face him.

"And you're a stalker," she says. "I'd think that would be beneath your dignity, running after a human who rejected you."

Eric bares his teeth, revealing his fangs.

Sookie walks back into the room, still keeping the bed between her and the window. Eric crouches on the windowsill outside and regards her thoughtfully across the distance.

"Truly, Sookie," he says, after a few seconds. "How do you see this ending? It is only a matter of time before I lose patience and take you."

"So what if you do?" She stands straight and stiff. "I know you're stronger than me. So what? I'm a woman, I'm used to that."

Eric's eyes widen. She feels his uncertainty, and she's not sure if she's reading his mind or feeling his blood.

"My uncle molested me when I was a child," she tells him.

Eric's hand reaches for her, only to meet an invisible wall of resistance. He wraps his fingers around the side of the window frame instead, knuckles tightening.

"Men at the bar grab me and touch me all the time," she continues. "Bill _raped_ me."

Eric hisses through his fangs, like a snake. She can feel his shock, and fury.

"I've been putting up with all that for so long that I've learned a little secret." Sookie takes a deliberate step closer to him. "Nothing you take from me by force has any meaning."

Eric's thoughts are an almost wordless tangle of confusion, longing, and violence. _Mine_, he thinks, _I will destroy them, I will comfort her, I will make her safe, I will-_

and then, like a ray of light in the darkness, a sober, almost human-sounding thought intrudes on the rest: _In her eyes, I am no better than them._

Eric's fangs retract. His grip tightens on the window, and the wood splinters.

She can't help hearing the activity in his head, but she refuses to listen, and the thoughts become a blur of white noise in the background.

"You told me a story when I last sat at your kitchen table," he says finally. "My turn, now. Do you know the tale of Lancelot?"

Sookie frowns. "Lancelot, the knight of the round table? Aren't there a bunch of stories about him?"

"He raped a woman of Arthur's court," Eric tells her, and Sookie blanches. "Guinevere set his punishment. He was commanded to depart the court, and go in quest of an answer to a question."

"What question?"

"'What do women want?'" Eric smiles. "An impossible riddle, it was thought."

"I'd think it would depend on the woman," says Sookie, irritated.

"He met a witch on his travels," Eric continues. "She was old, twisted, deformed. But at night she transformed into a beautiful maiden, and she lay with Lancelot. Afterwards, she gave him a choice: to keep her as she was, ugly, but always faithful, or to have her beautiful, and unfaithful."

Sookie arches an eyebrow. "For most guys I know, that would be a no-brainer."

"Lancelot told her that she must decide for him," he says. "She chose to be beautiful. And to be faithful."

Sookie blinks. She stares at Eric, waiting for him to make his point. Then she realizes he already did.

"She wanted the choice," she says.

"Rem acu tetigisti." Eric smiles at her.

Sookie's mouth twists. _Whatever that means_. "You're no Lancelot."

"For you, I would become many things."

"You're a vampire. You can't change your nature."

"You don't know everything about me," he says, echoing the words she spoke to him across the kitchen table.

They look at each other silently for a moment.

"What do _you_ want?" she says.

Eric's thoughts run fast, a blur in her mind: _possess, fuck, defend, drink, consume-_

"To be your choice," he says at last.

Sookie blinks.

"I told you I didn't want to see you again," she says. "Yet here you are."

"You can only make a choice," he says, "if you have more than one option."

Faster than her eyes can follow, he is gone.

* * *

When she wakes up the next morning, the silence in her head is like a drug, wiping out all pain.

She walks into the kitchen and looks out the window, and for the first time since the walls in her mind came crashing down around her, she unclenches, letting everything through.

There's nothing. No watchers, no people for miles around.

Sookie opens her front door. She blinks, stepping hesitantly into the sunlight, as though she were a vampire. Her skin seems to relax when the light touches it, nothing like a vampire at all.

She thinks of Eric, of Bill, asleep, missing this. She imagines herself standing over them in their resting places, a stake in her hand.

_I don't want to die_, she thinks, and somehow the thought is shocking. She realizes that for weeks now she's been thinking of herself as being as good as dead. It had been easier that way, not to fight against the inevitable.

Does she really have a choice? she wonders. Eric is good at getting people to do what he wants, to think the way he wants them to think. But in his own twisty way, he's the most honest person she knows.

There are two ways she could go. She'd though death lay at the end of both paths. And maybe it does. But on the one hand, there's a chance, if only a remote one. And on the other, no chance at all.

She does have a choice, she realizes, but it's not what she thought it was. It isn't about trusting Eric at all. It's about what's certain, or what's unknown.

She stays out on the porch until sunset. Then she calls Eric at Fangtasia.


	5. Chapter 5

"I'm not inviting you in," Sookie tells Eric when he appears at her door a half hour later.

Eric stands on her porch, hands in his pockets. He looks relaxed, thoughtful. At her words, he arches an eyebrow.

"I just want to talk," she says. "You think you could manage that?"

"Shall I pull up a chair?" he says, sounding amused.

Sookie takes a deep breath. She steps over the threshold, onto the porch beside him. Eric's face takes on a frozen look. If he were a human man, Sookie thinks he would have stopped breathing for a second.

She lowers herself stiffly into a chair by the front door. Every muscle in her body is tensed in the fear that he will make a grab for her and fly them up into the night sky before she has a chance to say _sneaky double-crossing vamp bastard_.

But when he moves again, it is only to park his ridiculously oversized frame in one of her ancient white wicker porch chairs and rest his elbows on his knees, with his hands clasped in front of him. He looks at her from between the dip of his shoulders, then spreads his hands as though to say, _now what_.

"I'll send workmen to repair your window tomorrow," he tells her, when she doesn't speak right away. "If you'll allow it."

"Thank you, that won't be necessay." Sookie has already boarded the window up herself, and it'll do until winter.

Maybe because she hasn't had to force the thoughts of anyone else out of her head today, she finds it strangely easy to keep the contents of Eric's mind at a low hum, easily ignored. Still, she feels the impatience, the frustration he feels when she rejects his offer.

"The night the maenad attacked me," she says, surprising herself. "Bill and I had a fight. You asked me what it was about."

"And you refused to tell me," says Eric. "You take delight in denying me."

"I wouldn't call it delight," she says. "And it isn't just you. Bill and I fought because he'd just bought a couple of businesses, and he told everyone who worked for him to give me carte blanche any time I came in."

Eric's face twisted in a smile. "You must have been livid."

"You don't understand why, though, do you?" she says.

"I know that you are proud," says Eric. "It's why I love you."

Sookie's brain freezes for an instant. She stares at him, a question in her face._ You love me_, she doesn't say.

He seems to hear what she isn't saying. _Didn't you know?_ his own ironic smile says.

"Bill's never been poor," she says, when she can speak again. "Not even when he was human. You-I guess, since you lived all those years ago, you must have known what it was like to go hungry from time to time."

"Yes," he says. "Yes, I knew hunger, even then."

"Then maybe you can understand better than Bill what it's like for me," she says. "If you can dig down deep and remember what it was like to feel powerless."

"You have great power," Eric protests.

She shuts her eyes. For a moment, the memory of her last night at Merlotte's washes over her, and the pain claws at her head. She clenches her fists, until she feels Eric's hand closing over them.

"It doesn't feel like a power," she says. "It's just another thing that happened to me. At least you vampires respect it-sort of. But as far as the people around here are concerned, about the only thing I've got going for me is a pretty face, and that doesn't make up for the fact that they think I'm crazy. If you could hear what the men around here think-they figure I'd be a good lay, but I'm not the girl they want to marry, or have kids with."

Eric growls low in his throat, a bestial noise that raises the hair on the back of her arms.

"I know you can't understand that," she tells him. "But that's why I wasn't going to show up at church in a five hundred dollar dress everyone knew Bill Compton paid for. Everyone would figure that five hundred dollars was what I was worth to him, and that I'm available to first man who comes along and offers me six hundred. I can't stop them believing that, but I won't let anyone think I don't value myself above any price anyone can pay me in money."

"Is that why you deny my gifts?" says Eric. He leans toward, intent. "I would honor you, Sookie, never shame you. No vampire who saw you displaying my gifts would mistake you for a whore. We do not bestow favors on humans lightly."

There are a number of things that Sookie could say to this, the first and most obvious being, _I don't live with vampires._ But instead she finds herself thinking of Tara, of the gifts that Franklin Mott and Mickey had given her.

"Let me tell you another story, since we're getting in the habit," she tells Eric. "When I was sixteen, there was this girl in my class named Hannah. We weren't real close, but we rode the same bus. One day during lunch she came up to me and told me how her parents had kicked her out of the house, and she was living with this man in her trailer park who was way older than her. She wasn't dating him, she didn't even like him, but he gave her a place to stay, and she didn't have anywhere else to go. She woke up one morning and found him in bed with her, and she just let him climb on top of her because she was scared he'd kick her out otherwise."

Eric's face tightens. He is angry because he thinks she is comparing him to the man who took advantage of Hannah. But there is something deeper to his thoughts as well, a roil of disgust at the man's behavior, a fleeting thought that if such a thing had happened in his area, with his knowledge, he would have brought justice down on the man like a hammer. Sookie hardly knows how to feel; somehow she had never thought of Eric's vengefulness as an impersonal thing, extending beyond the immediate circle of his-how had he put it-his _retinue_.

She takes a deep breath and plunges on.

"Hannah never talked to me again after that. I don't even know why she talked to me in the first place. I guess I was safe to confide in, since everyone thought I was crazy. But I couldn't stop thinking about it. For years afterwards, I'd play that conversation over in my head. Then one day, when I was older, I realized why it bugged me so much. I thought about the girls I knew at school who came from families with money, and I tried to imagine something like that happening to one of them. And I just couldn't. That was the day I figured out what being poor really means. It isn't just about people giving you snooty looks because you buy your clothes at Wal Mart. It means you're never as safe as people with money."

Eric is still looking at her-less angry now, more confused. So Sookie swallows, and says, "I think-compared to vampires, all humans are just poor country cousins."

Eric stares at her. She doesn't have to read his mind to know what he's thinking-his face is an open display of incredulity, frustration, enlightenment, and defeat. He stands up, so suddenly that Sookie gasps and lurches back in her chair. Rather than turning on her, however, he begins to pace up and down the length of her porch.

Eventually, he stops, standing a few feet away from her. She turns to face him. He seems to be struggling, not for words, but the will to say them.

"I told you I would prove to you that you can trust me," he says. "I have not yet learned how I may do so. I will prove to you instead what trust I place in you."

There's a kind of sigh in the air, the noise of matter traveling through space faster than the eyes can follow. Sookie looks down and finds Eric crouching at her feet, staring up into her face.

"There is one truth about humans that every vampire knows, though we do not speak of it, and we rarely acknowledge it even to ourselves. We are too proud, too-vampire." He grins, displaying his teeth. "But it haunts us, and it shapes all our dealings with your kind."

"I'm all ears," says Sookie, feeling strangely breathless.

"It's very simple," he says, "And doubtless it has crossed your mind before. But it goes deeper than you can imagine. It is-what do they say these days-an insecurity at the core of our existence. And it is this: you can exist without us. But we cannot exist without you."

Sookie blinks down at Eric, startled. "Sure you can," she says. "Nowadays, at least. You have synthetic blood, it wouldn't matter if we all died of the superflu tomorrow."

"And who invented the synthetic blood?" says Eric. "Not vampires. Humans. Humans create. They adapt, they build, they make the world we live in. Vampires do not become scientists, or artists, or architects, or poets. We do not grow, we do not-evolve. I have lived for longer than you can imagine, Sookie. I have seen the world change. Humans changed it. You overcome every obstacle. You have so little life, but you make every moment count. We envy this. We are-in awe of you."

Eric rises and takes a step back. Sookie sits frozen in her chair, staring wide-eyed back at him.

"We have immortality," he says. "We have strength. But as you, in your wisdom, have told me already-we cannot truly possess anything that is not freely given. So we snatch, we steal, we overpower, and congratulate ourselves on our superiority. But is is all farce. For every comfort of our existence, everything that makes immortality worthwhile, we are indebted to you. And we can hardly bear it."

Eric bends down and wraps his hands around Sookie's wrists. He raises her to her feet, then runs his hands up her arms to her shoulders. The breath he draws in to speak with stirs the hair falling around her face.

"That is why you must not speak of being poor, and powerless," he says. "Not to me, especially. My gifts to you are no more than offerings at your feet, pleas for your favor. I am no better than any of my kind. To me, you are life. And I cannot exist without you."

Eric clasps her face in his hands and lowers his head to kiss her. It isn't like any time he has ever kissed her before. Though she can feel the desire building inside him, his touch is undemanding. It is gentle, reverent, and his lips touch hers lightly, as Gran's lips had touched the rosary every morning of her life after she said her prayers.

When he pulls away, Sookie does not release him. She brings her hand up to his face. Then, deliberately, she opens her mind to his.

_Love me_, he thinks, over and over again_. Love me, love me, love me-_

"I do," she says.


	6. Chapter 6

**Author's Note** Thank you for reading and reviewing. This is the last chapter, barring the epilogue.

* * *

Eric's eyes widen. She sees the shock in his face. She wills herself to stand firm, to not run for the door, to give him the chance he claimed he was looking for, to prove himself.

He takes a step back. His hands become fists. She fights not to flinch.

"You can hear my thoughts," he says.

Sookie shuts her eyes. She nods.

"For how long?" he says.

Sookie draws a deep breath. _In for a penny, in for a pound._

"Up until two weeks ago, it only happened a few times," she says. "I heard you the night I first met you at Fangtasia, and once in Dallas. But then-then-"

Sookie collapses back in her chair. The tears come, and it's an effort to speak through them. She tells Eric how it began, the pain, the constant noise in her head, the night at Merlotte's when the dam broke. She tells him how far she had to flee to leave the noise behind, how she turned to Bill for hope and relief only to find fear. She tells him how she heard him in the kitchen, over the phone, how the watchers in the woods invaded her thoughts as though they were in the house with her.

She doesn't tell him why she hid from him. He's smart enough to figure that part out for himself.

He doesn't move or change expression all the time she's talking. He is completely still, a dead body no longer pretending to be alive.

When she finishes, she looks down at her lap. She's wringing her hands, something she'd read about but never actually seen anyone do.

"So," he says, after a long, silent pause. "You _were _afraid of me."

"Not just you," she says.

"You thought I would kill you," he says.

"If you don't, another vampire will." She forces her hands to lay still. "I can't hide this. I can't control it. I can't be near-anyone. The pain, the noise. I think-I think I would rather if you killed me, than live this way. I'll never be able to work again. I'll end up in an institution, drugged out of my mind, and it still won't help because I hear them in my _sleep_, Eric-"

She starts crying again. Eric doesn't move to comfort her. She's grateful for that; he hasn't begun to have a reaction yet, and whatever is yet to come will be worse if she thinks for a moment that it's safe to lose herself in his arms.

"You locked yourself in your house for two weeks to keep this secret from me," he says at last. "Why are you telling me now?"

Sookie looks up at him. His face is still blank.

"I'm lost any which way," she says, conscious that her voice is small, almost childish. "At least with you, I'm not alone."

"You might have told Bill," he says. "You must know that he would die defending you."

Sookie blinks, flummoxed. The thought of telling Bill hadn't even occurred to her. "That would just be hiding again," she said. "Telling you makes it-real."

"You would rather die than not be honest with me," he says.

Sookie squirms, uncomfortable in the intensity of his gaze. "I guess I would," she mutters.

Eric takes two slow, deliberate steps closer to her. He turns his expressionless face down to hers.

"What am I thinking right now?" he says.

Sookie blinks. Fearfully, she lowers what's left of her shields, and listens.

"You're thinking that killing me would be the smart thing to do," she says in a wobbling voice. "And that, when it comes to me, you never seem to be able to do the smart thing. You-you hate yourself when I'm afraid of you. It makes you sick to think of hurting me. You think-"

Sookie breaks off. Hope-something she hasn't felt for longer than she can remember-surges in her chest.

"You think there might be a way to fix me?" she says.

Eric drops to his knees. He seizes her hand and crushes it against his mouth. "I will find one," he says. "If no cure exists, I will bind some shaman to my will and _make_ one."

"That could take the rest of my life," she whispers. "Until then, I'm a threat to every vampire in your area."

"There is no malice in your heart," he says. His lips find the inside of her wrist, and heat floods her body. "No lust for power, or control. I trust you, Sookie Stackhouse. I trust you with my life, and the lives of all those I protect."

"Oh," says Sookie. Her breath catches in her throat, and turns into a sob. "_Oh_."

Eric wraps his hands around the sides of her head, weaving his fingers into her hair, forcing her to meet his eyes.

"You shut yourself into that house for two weeks, thinking death and madness and ruin lay ahead of you," he says.

"They probably still do," Sookie says faintly.

"No." His fingers tighten, pulling her hair.

Sookie touches his face. "Someone will kill me sooner or later," she says.

"I will not allow it," he says, not in a snarl, but in a cold, assured voice that is somehow more threatening.

"I can't be around people without going crazy, Eric. I can't _work_."

"I will take care of you until you can take care of yourself." His look of warning cut off her protest. "You will _let_ me. Because you understand me, now. Because you love me."

"I don't even see how you can."

"Trust me." He kisses her. "Trust me." He kisses her again, leaning into her, pushing her gently against the back of the chair. "Trust me," he whispers, a command, a plea, a promise.

When he rises, he scoops her up with him. He starts for the door, only to stop at the threshold. A pained expression flickered over his face.

"Won't you please come in," Sookie says.


	7. Epilogue

**Author's Note **Well, this is the end. Thank you so much for reading, and for your long, lovely, intelligent reviews. I'll try to get back to everyone at least once. I hope the epilogue satisfies; it may not be quite the ending you were hoping for, but I for one like to leave a story slightly unsettled. It lives longer in the imagination that way.

* * *

He should have killed her the first time he saw her.

A hundred years ago, fifty, even twenty, she would have been dead within minutes of the first time he laid eyes on her. When he thinks of the night Bill first brought her to Fangtasia, he can still remember how she called to the hunger inside him. She'd burned like a candle against the red and black embers of his domain, and he'd beckoned her close, to warm himself in that light.

He should never have given her a chance to open her mouth. She had no sooner spoken to him than she had roused something deadlier than hunger inside him.

He's not sure how she did it. There is no art in her, no guile. Her seduction was irresistible, because it was unconscious. She was, not a study in contrasts, but a contrast in herself. Others cowered before him; she was merely courteous. Others sought to manipulate him; she was forthright.

Occasionally he has met with humans who hate his kind, who pretend to be unimpressed by him. They mask their fear with loathing and contempt, and this, he has always assumed, is what it means for a human to speak to a vampire as though they were equals. But Sookie had spoken to him with a respect that held no trace of servility. She had spoken to him as though he were _human_-as though, in her mind, he had a place in her sunlit world of children and church picnics and laughter.

Such a simple, shattering thing. For a millenia, he has lived as a breed apart. Then she appeared, and now he is filled with a crushing, childlike desire to _belong_. She walks within a dream, and he would give anything he possessed to walk beside her.

He isn't alone in this. Every vampire who knows her feels it. Eric understands now the possessive fury Bill felt when first he made his interest in Sookie obvious. But he feels no sympathy for him. Bill was like a vain child displaying his prize to other children, to excite their envy. But Eric had seen more than Bill meant him to. Bill had been a fool to ever bring Sookie to Fangtasia in the first place.

For a long time now, Eric has been unable to imagine Sookie's death with agony. But if he had been wise, he would have killed her that night. Because now he is a stone carving undergoing a slow transformation into flesh. It is painful beyond words, a new and undreamed-of kind of death. But there is nothing so wrenching, so irresistible, as the passage from death into life.

That is what Sookie is to him. Life.

* * *

She won't let him take her to his home in Shreveport, so he turns Fangtasia over to Pam indefinitely and takes up residence in Bon Temps.

Sookie is in constant pain, and when he reflects on the greater agony she must have suffered before she confided in him, he feels-unworthy. A strange sensation, for any vampire. But he knows, in what passes for his heart, that he is much to blame for her suffering. She had weighed him in the balance and found him wanting, unsafe, untrustworthy. She is not given to harsh judgments, so he knows that he is responsible for looking to her like the specter of death.

He does what he can to atone, within the limits she imposes on him. Eric knows that he has reached her, finally, on some deeper level, when she allows him to pay her bills the first month she no longer has a paycheck to draw on. She lets him cover the expense of a thorough hospital examination, as well, including extensive tests that map the electrical activity inside her brain. But it is difficult to take much satisfaction in this when the tests prove uninformative.

He isn't nearly done trying to find an answer, but every day that Sookie passes in pain and confinement, he senses her growing resignation to what her life has become. She sleeps in the day, now, because his company, and Pam's and Bill's, is all that keep her from complete isolation. Her human friends visit her less and less often, because she has no protection at all from the intrusion of human minds, and they cannot bear to bring her more pain.

Eric, Bill, and Pam each try to persuade her to let herself be turned. They are all convinced that her powers would come under regulation, if she were a vampire. But Sookie is determined to cling to her humanity, and though Eric cannot believe he would love her less as a vampire, he knows that he, too, would mourn the loss of her human life-not only for her sake, but for his.

His people supply them with blood and groceries, clothing and home repairs. Their life together settles into a very nearly comfortable routine. Because Sookie chafes at inactivity, he teaches her how to handle Fangtasia's books, and they conduct the club's business across the kitchen table from each other, Sookie working at her new laptop, Eric taking meetings over the phone.

_"Sounds like a marriage,"_ Sookie had said to him once, in what feels like another lifetime. _"Yes,"_ he'd said to her then. All he wants to say to her, every day, is _yes_.

He wakes early one evening, before the last of the sun's rays have faded from the sky, and walks out to the kitchen. Sookie is sitting on the porch, watching the pink and orange glow over the treetops. He fights every instinct he possesses and steps outside to join her. The remnants of sunlight raze his skin, but the pain passes, and he sits beside her, taking her hand in his lap, and they listen to the crickets and cicadas strike the first notes of their evening symphony.

Sometimes, when she looks at him, there is something not unlike contentment in her expression, and he wonders to himself if this is such a bad way to pass a mortal lifetime, in shelter and companionship. She is somehow undiminished by all that she has lost, as though the essence of her is a fluid thing, taking the shape of what contains it.

He has not done looking for answers, though he knows her liberty will bring an end to the dream he's living. She is less like water than light, and the world he lives in, and will continue to live in long after her, is brighter when she is unconfined.

"It's almost October," she says, an idle thought that drifts easily into the comfortable silence. "The nights will be getting longer soon."

He knows, as surely as though he could read her thoughts, that for her the nights are long enough already. But she is thinking of him, and he is basking in the miracle of her selflessness.

To him, she is life, the catalyst of his transformation. For her, he will transform yet again. Eric the Northman, vampire, bringer of light.

One day soon, he will see her shine again.


End file.
